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I know next to nothing about publishing, so do take my opinions with a rather sizable grain of salt. With the growing prevalence of ebooks, the "waste of paper" seems a bit weak. And the ridiculously rapid pace of tech advancement strikes me as more of a boon than a problem - for most topic-centric books, you only get to sell it once to an enthusiast. With tech books, you get the opportunity many times over. "rather than buying tech books i just read blogs, quora, stack overflow, and i think a lot of people do the same. it's faster, cheaper, etc. for example, as i am learning iOS programming, the docs on apple.com are great, as are some third party tutorials." And if the content of the book doesn't outpace those sources - I wholeheartedly agree, the book shouldn't exist. But I buy books with the expectation that they do provide me with a better and faster experience than I would have gotten by just googling on my own. All that said, I sure as heck haven't written a book. So obviously the author is better versed on this topic than I am. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt - perhaps there's some sort of opportunity here. Like (pulling at the lowest-hanging fruit), rather than creating "just" a book, creating a subscription-based community around a topic? |